Yesterday, many media outlets, including NewsDaily and Yahoo, reported that an employee of an Apple supplier in China (Foxconn) committed suicide over a missing iPhone.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t miss updates on Procurement & Supply Chain, Subscribe here!<\/p>\n
According to these reports, the employee, Sun Danyong, was responsible for shipping prototypes of iPhones from Foxconn to Apple. Sun \u201cbecame frantic after discovering that one of 16 prototypes of Apple\u2019s fourth-generation N90 iPhone had gone missing.\u201d Reportedly, Foxconn security guards searched his apartment, detained him and beat him.<\/p>\n
While the Yahoo article includes a denial of a beating by Foxconn\u2019s security chief, he did say \u201cI was a little angry and I pulled his right shoulder once to get him to tell me what happened.\u201d The next day, Sun jumped to his death from his 12th floor apartment.<\/p>\n
Some media outlets have begun to cast blame on Apple, calling its culture \u201chighly secretive\u201d and \u201cintensely guarded.\u201d Apple has stepped forward to combat this negative PR with a statement saying \u201cWe require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.\u201d<\/p>\n
I will come to Apple\u2019s defense on this. Apple has been one of the leaders in having a supplier code of conduct. I even referenced Apple as a benchmark in my 2006 article \u201cTrend Alert: The Supplier Code of Conduct.\u201d You can read Apple\u2019s Supplier Code of Conduct.<\/p>\n
In sum, while Apple does have responsibility for selecting its suppliers, they can\u2019t be held responsible for a beating that they did not authorize or condone nor a suicide that resulted from it. However, it will be interesting to see if this incident will compel Apple to change suppliers for PR reasons. Certainly, if something like this happened a second time with the same supplier, Apple would have no choice but to switch suppliers or risk significant damage to its revered brand.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the outcome, this is a landmark event for the importance of supplier codes of conduct. Certainly absent a supplier code of conduct, Apple would be in a far worse PR, and possibly legal, position.<\/p>\n
Do you have a supplier code of conduct implemented yet?<\/p>\n
As you can see, a supplier code of conduct can have strategic importance at a time that you least expect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, many media outlets, including NewsDaily and Yahoo, reported that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n